Is the sun setting in this photograph, or is it rising? Either way, the sun is moving through its cycle of birth and death, breakdown and renewal. Carl Jung, one of the fathers of psychoanalysis, said that when a person could hold the tension of the opposites he or she was on their way to understanding a great secret of a whole and complete life.

What is “holding the tension of the opposites?”

From one perspective it can be defined as an awareness of balance, and an acceptance of what we consider to be unacceptable or too painful to integrate into our whole being.

Recently a very close friend of mine had quite a traumatic experience. Something happened in his life that he believed to be entirely his fault and due to his lack of responsibility and short sightedness. The results were tragic. He is now devastated and does not know how he can go on without always being reminded of something that he feels he should have averted. This is a story that most of us can tell about moments in our own life. Most of us, if not all of us, have regretted an action, or a non-action, which resulted in a seriously negative outcome.

Some have formidable ghosts haunting them when that outcome is a tragedy that is just too great to accept.

But the sun always rises, and no matter how difficult life presents itself there will always be a time that eventually comes where the difficulty takes on a different view, a different perspective, or simply fades a bit into history. “This too shall pass.”

We often have a tendency to replay a trauma again and again, over months and years. Although it is important to fully integrate any difficult experience and allow it to process, it also can be detrimental to recreate the event in such a way that it is never allowed to transform naturally over time.

It is helpful to realize that all experiences are not simply a set of objective events but in fact include the story surrounding the events. The story includes in some way nearly every association that is made with the elements of the particular experience. And the story is colored by our particular and unique way of looking at the world and our relationships in it. There is more to it than what meets the eye, and our sorrow may be a response to much more than just the objective facts.

The point, again, is to be conscious and to allow the natural process of healing to take place. Stay as grounded as you can and gather people around you that help you avoid becoming too fragmented. As you move further away from the troubling event, begin to look at it as the multifaceted experience that it is.

Find hidden meaning in it, the lessons to be learned, and the wisdom to be gleaned. None of this will probably be apparent to begin with, but over time we usually can reframe the trauma in such a way that it becomes part of our own life cycle. When our life inevitably offers us these shadow moments of the setting sun, it will almost as assuredly bring us the day that the sun rises again.